ABSTRACT
The Castle of Otranto has often been seen as indicative of Walpole’s reactionary nostalgia, his longing to escape into an idealised past, later embodied in Strawberry Hill. The very name ‘gothic novel’ which was ultimately given to the form he created is an oxymoron that reflects its desire to identify conflicting impulses: both towards newness, novelty, originality, and towards a return to nature and revival of the past. As later gothic novels also show, however, such chances are always strictly predetermined. In Walpole’s tale, cause and effect seem both opposed, as actions have ludicrously disproportionate consequences, and yet rigidly bound together, as past actions relentlessly effect the present. Shakespeare often appears as a kind of patron saint of imaginative freedom for the gothic, a voice from a golden age before the tyranny of neoclassicism with its rules and unities set in.
